Dressing Rooms (and the 'Plan-B' rig)

Thelma Handy, the joint leader of the Liverpool Philharmonic, whose dressing room I was kindly loaned recently, has a high-speed Cat 5 Internet connection in hers (it made up for the horrible Queen's Dock Campanile hotel), and plenty of sockets and work surfaces to boil a travel kettle, iron a shirt, recharge a shaver, and all the other road necessities that need plugging in. I had to resist an urge to scrawl "Thelma, you rock!" across her mirror. Legion Arts in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has an entire and very comfortable apartment on our side of the proscenium. Even the stinky old Half Moon has a kettle, loo and shower backstage with the broken chairs.

Frequently, though, dressing rooms are cells to be endured somehow: graffiti'd and decorated with felt-tip fertility charms by obscure egotists; corners not required by commercial ambition uncleaned, fetid and as unloved as only a beer-joint owner can despise a musician. To be fair, after I repeatedly referred on stage to Philadelphia's Tin Angel dressing room as "the suicide room", the kindly manageress did put some lamps and drapes in, and thereafter only the lowliest support acts were housed alongside the secondary dressing room's resident and regularly crashing industrial-capacity ice machine. But the memory of the couple whose sexual relationship had disintegrated while they ingenuously continued their musical partnership has forever soured that place. The wronged cellist's passionately mooing hour-long pre-show warm-up duet with the ice machine, while her guitarist ex hid in the bar, played a major part in my refusal to have openers ever again. Well, for a long time thereafter anyway, and she certainly influenced the quest for noise-reducing headphones.

Some of the oddball sites have been fun. The flapping tarp screens erected alongside the open-air stage in Wroclaw town square offered the unusual opportunity to drop my trousers inches from respectable Polish burghers without facing arrest. And at another festival I did enjoy evicting from my bit of the tent an overweening sleb and the bossy journalist who'd set up an interview tape recorder too close to my kettle.

One needs to be dressing-room-proof, able to isolate oneself at least from noise in order to focus on tuning, warm-up and a set plan. The gigs I have most seriously buggered up all lacked that sequestered preparation; the degree of cack-handedness in my performances always relates directly to pre-show distraction. To be minimally comfortable, one needs a table, a chair and a nearby power outlet, all behind the closable door of a room that's roughly the same temperature and humidity as the stage. It's not asking too much, is it? One horrible gig in Buffalo, NY, had so non-existent a relationship with normal seating that I did the show seated on an upended breeze block — and never mind being expected to change in a piss-flooded toilet! That promoter is now in prison for bouncing cheques across state lines.

It's not just the Half Moon that puts its more lethal chairs in the dressing room; frequently, it's hard to track down a regular-size armless one that you can sit on to play a guitar. Crates can double up as a table if you get enough of them, and a piece of black scrim is always a useful covering, even if it's just to save you having to wash them or from dropping your capo down the middle. Nowhere to hang clothes? Grab a microphone stand. Need a modesty screen? Grab two boom stands, gaffer-tape the booms together horizontally and throw some black scrim over them. Black scrim is always your friend; some smoothed out on your table can save you from losing the small parts of an emergency repair or a tricky battery change — although the most important screw will always be stuck to the back of the pickup you just re-mounted!

If you've landed the 'first-soundcheck-last-on' slot on a gig in a strange town, then I'd recommend your own kettle, a titanium teapot (I kid you not: www.rei.com/product/764184) and samosas, or at least an apple stashed somewhere — anything but the supermarket sandwiches made by disgruntled immigrants. I've done a few where I was last out as well, long after the kitchen and bar staff called it a day, and a good strong brew before the drive home was a life-saver. A tea boost wears off more gradually than the frighteningly sudden coffee crash, and a good-quality organic Assam doesn't even need any milk.

I tried a Sennheiser Noise Guard PXC250 pair and they are as easy to tangle as the QC1 on two AAA batteries, brighter in the mids, less scooped and sanitised than the Bose, and there is a background hiss, but not enough to obscure. My son-in-law has used them for commuting for a year and still likes them. They look fragile (the battery box hinge has broken), but they pack up smaller than the Bose.

I tried a pair of Maplin's noise-reducing cans and the response curve was so atrociously lumpy I wouldn't even pass them onto a tone-deaf grandson for computer gaming. They went in the bin as a service to music, and I assumed Maplin had the same out-of-tune radio blaring in R&D as they have in some of their shops.

Since the battery-box Bose, there has been a Quiet Comfort 2 version, which uses a single generic AAA-size battery that fits, along with the electronics, inside the earcups. More convenient than the battery-box style, but just as unfaithful, I've used a pair for a few years and now the ear cushion is disintegrating, leaving black specks on my face and ears. The headband has also failed and is held together by surgical tape. Replacement cushions cost £30, or clapped-out and out-of-warranty headphones can be traded in against a new pair in the UK that would be discounted, from £225 delivered to £125 delivered. A pal and I were told in the USA that the reason he could get a deal then on a pair for $250 (a $50 discount, give or take a cent) was that later ones had better shielding against mobile phone emissions. You can check for these stuttering interference sounds by sending a text whilst wearing the headphones. There is also now a QC3 version with a smaller earcup and own-brand rechargeable batteries. They require specific chargers, adding to the junk burden on the road, and after a while you have to give Bose another £40 a pop for new batteries.

An alternative to the Bose and much cheaper (currently at www.amazon.co.uk for £24.90 plus p&p) are the Sony MDR-NC6 noise-cancelling headphones. These run on a generic AAA battery and are not as insulating as the Bose, but are less irritatingly scooped sounding. Swapping straight over to them from the Bose, they sound muffled in fact, but lifting treble on the source takes care of that and I can hear, set back a little, the mid and high-mid characteristics of my guitar that are completely lost in the Bose. Switching the NR on causes the external sound to, oddly, appear in the right headphone with low mids and bass attenuated. The headphones come in one of those lethally sharp, hard plastic bubble packs, with a stereo mini-jack, an airline double-plug adaptor, but no quarter-inch stereo adaptor. They are light to pack and look flimsy, but I'm not hearing any peaks as horrible as the Maplin attempt, and unlike the Bose they'll still work with the NR switched off, are cheap to replace and less of a temptation to a casual thief. Amazon will show you a range of NR cans — all consumer electronics, rather than specifically for musicians. Take an iPod with known sounds plus reference cans and irritate your local hi-fi emporium to find the pair you can live with.

What is very useful about these things is that, given a little tweaking and a stereo splitter cord, they can provide a 'Terminal 5' Plan B. They're small enough to be stuck in a guitar bag and forgotten about until you're standing by the baggage carousel with it dawning on you that you're in Helsinki, on stage in a couple of hours and your stage processor is probably in Milan. Of course, this assumes you've been able to get your guitar into the cabin, and if you can't do that it might not be worth accepting the booking anyway. Since Last Night Of The Proms conductor Mark Elder pointed out to the nation that musicians were effectively unable to tour due to government panic cabin baggage restrictions, things eased considerably, but that was 2006 and airlines invariably slowly backslide away from any benevolence to all but their coveted premium-fare business passengers.

During my initial attempt 18 years ago to get any attention in the USA, I did a lot of hopping about on planes, travelling as light as possible with no big checked-in processors. I walked into every kind of sound system, from very good to a couple of dodgy boxes and a hissing amp. To give myself some kind of sonic cover, at first I used a few stomp boxes that would pack up light. The stomp box range was somewhat limited until I expanded the range to overflow my cabin baggage — I think the last straw was the excellent, but weighty Peavey SRV digital reverb pedal and its specific PSU — so I got hold of a Zoom 9000, and with that and a couple of EQs did most of the gigs with no serious problems beyond quite short reverbs and echo times.

The Zoom was very noisy with a clean magnetic, but OK with the quite hot output from an unpreamped Ovation pickup run first through a TC dual parametric. The little Korgs are better for noise: tonally not too versatile, but capable of a reasonable basic clean sound and a couple of light effects. The reverb is OK if not too much is demanded of it. The PX3 delays can be long, are either/or with reverb, and have presets that can more or less match tempi. The compressor is like a cricket pitch roller anywhere over one dot on the level indicator, but hook a Pandora into a PA via its quarter-inch stereo jack out and you can make it through to pay time.

Sound quality? Most times, the PA sound is sufficiently inaccurate and the air conditioning unruly enough to make tonal pickiness a fastidious luxury. On the occasions when you've got a decent PA and engineer, then you've usually got access to a decent reverb in the house rack, so the Plan B weedy ones don't matter.

The lithium-ion internal battery charges from the USB 2 connector (it accepted my USB 1 without complaint) or from a mains adaptor, and when I queried iPod tragic battery syndrome with Tascam, this is what their Gary Maguire said: "The MP-GT1 can be charged up to 300 — 500 times before it loses its full charge. If you were using the unit on a daily basis for, say, five hours, this would mean you would get approximately two years out of an installed battery. This is a user replaceable battery and instructions to do so can be found in the user manual. A replacement battery can be obtained from acoustic services, our spares distribution company."

The replacement instructions are indeed in the manual and are straightforward: undo four screws and pull the back off. At reassembly, the battery cable needs packing carefully and the on/off slider switch claw needs careful lining up with the internal toggle. Something else that adds to its usefulness is that it has just under 1GB of flash memory for music you want to listen to on the road, so, accepting that the dressing room facility is very good, if you can get by with the quite basic Plan B sound, it's got a lot going for it.

A recent surprise was the Line 6 Gear Box software. Mac and PC, it came to me almost accidentally and sat in my laptop ignored once I'd established that the Strobosoft tuner could see my guitar through the USB interface with which it came, and which was the object of my expenditure. Pottering idly one day, I realised it did everything the PX3 did, but more flexibly. It's cheap, discounted to between £40 and £50 at various sources in the UK. I got mine in Medway, Oregon, for about $80.

The basic Gear Box bundle comes with the USB box and USB lead. Software includes a tuner, a metronome and small programmable drum machine, amp models and a basic functional selection of effects, including a quite OK chorus. The drum machine is limited in kit range, but capable of compound times and waltzes, and thus flexible enough for warm-up and practise. The reverb and delays are good. There is no question of latency, as, in fact, all the processing gubbins is in the USB interface: the Tone Port GX. The bits in the computer are merely the GUI, the power supply, and another application that can cut download deals on-line and get system updates.

There is a volume control on the Tone Port. I have used it for dressing rooms ever since and am content, beyond a gripe I have with all of the Plan Bs so far, to wit: it is not possible to save tempo information along with tone patches. Having to reset the rhythm patches separately slows down a quick check through a set. As a Plan B, it works directly into a PA via a mini-jack to quarter-inch 'Y' lead, and if you're wondering why one might take a laptop on stage, I'd wonder why you were considering not taking it with you to the one place you can watch over it. Gossip relays yet another tale of dressing room laptop theft as I write, and many are the gigs where I've piled up my travelling worldly goods on stage in the gear cases under a piece of black scrim.

Tonally, Gear Box has more variety than the Korgs. It has more bite and edge, and a much subtler array of tonal possibility from the various amp models. As a device for a soloist, it's really very good, and although it looks from the huge range of distortion patches in the chargeable download add-on packs as if Line 6 are a bedroom shred outfit, if you leaf through those packs you'll notice a lot of effects and amplifier/speaker cab models that will work well clean if you simply back off the drive gain — especially necessary with a piezo pickup, as the violent attack transient can be very disruptive. There is an effects pack that has some nice ones, including a chorus or two that offer some textural variation from the quite adequate version bundled with the Tone Port. I asked Line 6 about the PCB mount mini-jack output; they say they've had no failures so far, and in the event of catastrophe, policy is to replace the unit. I carry a short, soft extension lead so that any heavy cable load is well clear of the mini-jack socket.

Compared to Tone Port, the Pocket Pod is very limited indeed, but runs on four AAA batteries or a centre-negative 9V DC wall-wart, and can be set to give credible enough clean tones with a convincingly poky kick to them, to give you some significant Plan B control over what's coming out to the audience. As a dressing room tool, it lacks a metronome, but has a simple LCD tuner and a mini-jack input ostensibly for an MP3 player, so you could insert an electronic metronome there to settle your sense of tempo after a bad journey. It will run on a 9V wall-wart supply, but Line 6 couldn't give me a clear indication of actual power consumption beyond the fact that their own recommended 9V DC PSU supplies 200mA. I measured a peak draw of 141mA, cruising clean into cans at 112 — 114mA. It would seem that, should you want it, you've got somewhere around 50mA available for a couple of pedals, but check for yourself and if in doubt run extras on batteries. I'd throw in an extra pedal graphic for last-minute PA or room issues — the Boss GE7 wants 7mA, the GE7B wants 16mA.

I tried doubling up with a power 'Y' lead from a transformer-type Boss PSA using a Keeley compressor and it worked fine. And, in fact, a good-quality clean compressor on the beginning of the signal can take care of an awful lot of Plan B tonal raggedness, particularly some of the nasties caused by a piezo attack. My Keeley is showing a power consumption of 3.5mA with the attack delayed to the maximum, less at the more usable minimum, and at just under 10oz it can be such a significant part of Plan B that I invariably pack it in cabin baggage with the aspirins and earplugs as a kind of sonic Elastoplast.

Although Pocket Pod has a limited reverb and delay, and little going on in the way of effects beyond a choice of preset compression ratios and some limited modulation, it scores by offering the facility to select and tweak a decent variety of amp and speaker models via computer — Mac and PC. It comes with a USB cable, and the purchaser gets access to Line 6's site to download the freebie Vyzex software to programme the unit.

The much bigger Pod X3 requires more commitment. Its mains supply PSU is a heavy, two-amp, local-mains-voltage-only transformer affair, and along with the Pod itself would take up a significant amount of cabin baggage capacity. So for a Plan B and the dressing room, it's something of a complicated luxury. There is no battery option, so your dressing room must have mains — many do not! I tackled it optimistically, assuming as usual that manuals are unnecessary because there are always instructions on the fire extinguisher. It does have an acoustic application, there is a simplified parametric in there, and in extremis the two parallel channels can be combined to offer an even wider range of EQ tweaks than the already extensive line-up of EQ, amps and speaker combinations in a single channel.

Like Plasticine, if you mix up the bits enough you get a kind of duck poop colour, so less is invariably more when it comes to acoustic. Electric guitar speaker emulation is as problematic a colourant as physical electric guitar speakers. It has a good range of reverbs, delay models from digital through modulated tubes to fouled tape, and a choice of choruses that will all work well at the subtler levels required by a soloist. There is, inevitably, all the bedroom filth a noisy adolescent of any age could want, but plenty of older amp models that can sound good clean with the drive backed off.

I found I could drag and drop already assembled Gear Box patches into its editor, and then I did have to open the Old-Testament-weight manual. The book's alarming girth turned out to be due to its saying the same things five times over in different languages, and it took me half an hour to get slick with the programming.

The headphone socket is a welcome quarter-inch, and there are separate left and right mono jack main outputs, as well as a USB 2 socket and a digital out, so there is a range of hook-up options. It is still an eminently nickable toy, which counts against it, and the other issue with modellers generally is the comparison with the originals they claim to emulate. I think it's fruitless to get into this, and regard the patch claims as simple starting points for mucking about with some quite subtle EQ variations/combinations that get you a tone and ambience with which you can work. Of course, it's all a compromise, but this is a private warm-up and Plan B.

The Zoom G2 is another unit that requires more packing thought in the cabin bag, and perhaps we need to think about just how much we might have to dump for either X3 or G2. Will you take a laptop? Will you take a camera? Where will the headphones go? How much weight can you cope with hanging off one shoulder as you yomp around O'Hare? How big a carry-on bag do you want to present to a stroppy airline agent when you're negotiating not having your guitar destroyed in the baggage hold? There is only so much you can get into a multi-pocketed waistcoat before you look like a suicide bomber.

The G2 is roughly six inches square and, including knobs, two and a half inches deep. It will run on four AA alkaline batteries for a claimed seven and a half hours. It comes with a 300mA 9V-supply wall-wart, and I measured peak current draws of up to 270mA with a steady consumption around 160mA. The UK wall-wart is slightly smaller than the Boss PSA (transformer model), but equally heavy. The G2 does sport a noise-reduction function, but I could hear significant mains noise riding up alongside the signal using a Visual Sound 1 Spot switching PSU, so the lighter multi-voltage option doesn't work.

Alternatively, www.johnnyshredfreak.com offers a 1.5-amp switching PSU for £11.49 plus shipping. It's a plastic box measuring 93 x 57 x 33mm, with a little 9V cable coming out and a two-pin mains in. Top load is, they say, three amps, but restricting it to half capacity reduces generic noise. It will work fairly quietly with the Zoom with a high-output pickup system, but I found noise audible once more when I needed extra gain to get a workable level from a Baggs M1 on a bronze-strung acoustic. It's clear that, generally speaking, local-mains-voltage transformer-type wall-warts are the cleanest bet, and really we can only consider switching types when we know we can get away with it on particular effects units.

A big plus for the G2 is that it is cheap — RRP £89.99, but I've seen 30 percent discounts around. It also sounds pretty good. I found an easily accessible double range of EQ (plus or minus 12dB in the EQ module at 160Hz, 800Hz and 3.2kHz), and in the next one clockwise, the Extra EQ (plus or minus 12dB at 400Hz, 6.4kHz and 12kHz) — all this without getting into amp models and drive-level hassles. I had a workable solo tone in minutes, and few problems with piezo attack transient. The delay is OK, times available cover gig needs, and the reverb is OK — a bigger hall can be clanky, but there is a tone control. The tuner is odd to use: the note aimed at is named on the left of the central LED display, sharp shows in the upper part of the right side of the LED display as clockwise rotating lights, and flat shows in the lower part of the right side as an anticlockwise rotation. The drum machine is OK, patches from 30 upwards offer compound time shuffles and waltzes, but using it kills the reverb — you can't have drums and reverb together. So it fits the dressing room brief and will do a credible on-stage Plan B, but this comes, although not as badly as the Pod X3, at the cost of hand-baggage space.

On the whole, though, while the secluded sanctum may still be a rarely fulfilled dream, with a little thoughtful preparation you can both shut out the world briefly and cover a missing-kit emergency. The most important trick with the dressing room, whatever horror you end up in, is primarily some kind of sonic isolation so you can at least get your musical head together. NR cans? I think Bose QC cans are overpriced now and the entire genre is tonally compromised, but feed them your signal with a little reverb and you can get some private headspace — just don't touch any EQs you've set with more accurate monitoring.

The trick with Plan B is twofold. Firstly, to have it lying in the bottom of your cabin bag anyway, and secondly, to make it to settle-up without having irritated too many people. There is yet another, more radical Plan B that might horrify the acousticati, but which is less horrifying than what can happen to a checked-baggage acoustic. A solid (less hassle in the plane cabin) with piezo saddles, plugged into a Fishman Aura, a Keeley compressor and a Korg PX3 for a dab of reverb sounds very convincing indeed...  0